


The Lily Maid of Atlantis

by Hth



Category: Stargate Atlantis
Genre: Arranged Marriage, Multi, Original Character(s), POV Original Character, Sateda, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-08-20
Updated: 2012-08-20
Packaged: 2017-11-12 13:36:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,299
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/491625
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hth/pseuds/Hth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(aka The Bride of Ronon)</p>
<p>Being the Flower of Veerin makes Orah different from other girls -- more valuable, but less free.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Lily Maid of Atlantis

**Author's Note:**

> This was originally inspired, lo these many years ago, by the Virginity challenge on SGA Flashfic, and owes its eventual shape to the Heather Dale song, "Lily Maid."

Orah spent the year she was nine in the refugee camps, with her sister Bidia and their great uncle. Bidia said they were all that remained of the Veerin clan, but Orah never gave up hope. What life could there be for the three of them alone? How could they carry on at all? She prayed daily that they would be reunited with the rest of the clan and offered herself up, so that if the Ancestors needed an instrument to see to her family’s survival, they would have her.

Orah was a good child, patient and soft-spoken. She tended to her Uncle Dothan, who had lost most of the use of his legs before Orah could remember, without complaint, and if any of the few belongings they had brought with them from Ebanda were to tear or break, Orah found a way to fix them. So much had been lost that Orah could hardly bear the idea of giving up anything else, not even a jacket or a pair of scissors. She never cried, and she did not take part in the food riots, even though children younger than her fought the rationing agents with fists and broken glass.

And it was worth it in the end, all the patience, all the agonizing hope, because she did get her miracle after all. Ten months after Orah and Bidia and Uncle Dothan arrived in the camps, they were joined by Orah’s Aunt Jitta and her cousin Dalina, and best of all by Orah’s own father. She cried that day from joy, the two of them on their knees in the bare dirt of the camp, clinging to each other for nearly an hour. “My little flower, my little girl,” her father crooned into her golden hair. “We will live now, we will live forever because of you.”

Soon after, the clan obtained permission to relocate to Manaria. Orah’s father was a physician and could have had entrance to a host planet long before, but he had determined to stay on Sateda until he was certain that all the Veerin survivors were together again. Like Orah, he had never given up.

The six of them lived in a three-room house on Manaria, which felt like luxury after the refugee camps. The Manarians had a strict caste system, and her father was only permitted to treat the poorest three castes, but still it was enough money to feed them all and buy the first new clothes any of them had seen in a year. Her father bought soft, loose blue gowns and golden-tasseled belts for all three girls, and they plaited each other’s hair and stood in a neat line for his inspection. Dalina was nineteen years old, Bidia fourteen, and Orah just past her tenth birthday.

“You are all so beautiful,” her father said, with a tremor in his voice. “You will find husbands easily, as many husbands as you like, and Veerin will live and grow strong again through your children. In these desperate times, no treasure can mean as much to the future of a clan as to have such fine, healthy daughters.”

A marriage was contracted almost immediately for Dalina. Contract marriage was unknown to the Manarians, but a handsome young man from a mid-level caste had taken a liking to Dalina after meeting her at her work as a gardener’s assistant. He paid court to her home, and Orah’s father explained their people’s ways to him. He seemed fascinated, but looked reluctant when he was told that when her first child was born and had lived enough days to be named, Dalina and the baby would return to the clan. Orah’s father laughed at his hesitancy and said, “It is necessary, more necessary now than ever before. Dalina’s children will be Veerins and must be raised among the Veerins. But if you both wish it, the contract can be renewed when the child is weaned.”

“It’s no kind of marriage I’ve ever heard of,” Dalina’s suitor said, giving her a helpless, half-amused look and shaking his head. “Don’t you people have...ordinary marriages?”

Orah could see her father trying to hide his disapproval. “Never so young,” he said stiffly. “When she is older, Dalina may consider a partnership marriage, which is like the kind you know, but for now, her attention must be on bearing healthy children for the clan, not on building a life with any husband.”

Orah dressed her cousin’s hair for the wedding and held her trembling hand as they waited for her new husband to arrive. “Are you scared?” she asked, putting the last blood-red loramor blossoms into Dalina’s black hair.

“Yes – no – yes! Terrified,” Dalina laughed. “Excited.”

When the wedding was over, she hugged Orah and Bidia together, one arm around each, and rushed out the door after her new husband, smiling.

Orah did not see her again for months. Late that winter, Dalina arrived at the Veerin house in the small hours of the night, waking the whole clan by pounding on the door. Bidia kept Orah away, and the two of them sat on the mattress they shared, Bidia’s arm protectively around Orah’s shoulders, while they listened silently to Dalina weeping and begging her mother and Orah’s father to let her come home.

“I’m not a wife in that house,” Orah could hear her cousin say. “They treat me like Prounik’s whore, they think I’m _nothing_.”

“Don’t listen,” Bidia murmured, pulling Orah’s head against her shoulder and covering her other ear with her hand.

She did not get to say goodbye to Dalina again when her father walked her back to her husband’s home. When he came home, weary and sad-eyed, Orah made him tea and sat on his lap with her arms around his neck, although she was almost too big by then to do so. “Couldn't she have stayed for just a little while?” Orah asked meekly.

“My flower, I wish she could have. You don’t know how I wish it. But Dalina made vows, and Jitta and I made vows on behalf of the clan. Vows must always be honored. She is free of him forever, once she brings home her first child, and we will all pray that it happens soon. We will cherish Dalina’s child all the more because of the sacrifices she has made to bring him into the clan, won’t we?”

But Dalina brought home no child. Her body was pulled from the river a month later.

“I take the blame for this,” Orah’s father said, when they had brought Dalina’s body home to bury it on this new land that was not their own land. “I was wrong to permit Dalina to marry a Manarian. You girls are the future of Sateda; you must have Satedan marriages, Satedan children. This is how we will be sure that our home is not lost forever.”

The pain of Dalina’s death echoed in the house for years, and no one spoke any word of another marriage until Bidia was seventeen. There was a boy her own age, another Satedan refugee from the Zatik clan who worked as a bricklayer. He had no family of his own left, and was more than willing to leave the family he had been paying for board and to move in with the Veerins for the duration of his marriage to Bidia.

“Thank the Ancestors,” Orah said softly when she heard, kissing her sister’s cheek. “I don’t want anyone else from the family to leave us, not even for a little bit.”

But Bidia was not as well pleased by the match as the rest of the family was. She was, in fact, set against it entirely, though Orah couldn’t imagine why. At first she assumed it was nerves – the natural fears that attended a first marriage, compounded by the lingering wounds of the way in which Dalina was lost – but as time went on, it began to seem much more than that. Bidia could be roused to a fury by the suggestion of it, and the peace of the household was broken constantly by her passionate arguments with her father.

“How can you feel nothing for your family?” he shouted at her. “There are only five of us left, and three of us too old for our lives to mean much of anything. It is you, Bidia, everything depends on you!”

“Stop asking me to save Sateda!” Bidia shouted back. “There is no Sateda, it’s gone! We live on Manaria now, and things are different here. People are free here, they don’t have to live their whole lives for their family, they can be themselves! They get to make choices!”

“You dare to stand in front of me and call yourself a Manarian now? After what they have done to your family?”

“What did they do? What did they do but take us in when we had nothing? They’re not all like Dalina’s husband, Father! This is a good place. This is a good future, just a different one.”

Orah hated the fights more than anything. She would have liked to see Bidia married and hopefully soon to have a baby in the house, but it mattered more that she had peace in the family, so she tried to murmur patient words into both her father’s ear and her sister’s. Any accord they could come to was better than what they had.

But they never came to any accord. Bidia eloped with a Manarian boy – a partnership marriage, in the Manarian way. She left all of her belongings with Orah, and a letter saying that one day she would understand, one day she would fall in love, too, and not to let Father run her life and spoil everything for her. _You’ve always done everything you were told, little sister, the letter said. I wish you could let yourself be as happy as I am._

Happy. It had been nearly five years since the Wraith destroyed her world, and all of Orah’s hopes that there would be a Veerin clan to survive the loss of everything else she knew were coming to an end. There was only Orah now. “I’m sorry, Father,” she said, kneeling by his chair and resting her head on his leg. “I don’t think I can do it by myself. I don't think I'm enough.”

He stroked her hair and said with a break in his voice, “Nonsense, my flower. You are everything. You’re everything to us.”

Uncle Dothan died not long after that, and there was not enough household left to require the work of two women to run it, so Orah began to accompany her father to his clinic. She learned to treat small wounds and common infections, and where she could not help medically, she could at least sit with patients, read or sing to them and make sure they did not run out of water. Her father kept one eye on her at all times; he praised her to the skies and said often that she made his work lighter and more pleasant, but he had no intention of leaving her unguarded with any Manarian. Orah did not mind; she had no desire to experience whatever Dalina and Bidia had experienced. As far as Orah could tell, love brought nothing but the loss of your family, and nothing terrified Orah more than that. She still had nightmares from her childhood, the bombs and the riots and being lost in suddenly unfamiliar streets, looking for her family, for anyone she knew.

She could not lose her father again, not when they were each all that the other had.

They had three peaceful years, but it could not last. Without marriage and children for Orah, Veerin would truly be dead forever, and Orah knew that for both her and her father, that choice was no choice at all.

*

Even when she lived on Sateda, Orah rarely saw men of his kind: gold-skinned and dressed in leathers with his hair in elaborate twists, the fashion of the Eastern clansmen. A barbarian. Scarce enough even in the final generations of Sateda, she had not imagined there were any left at all now.

He looked around the front room of the clinic without speaking while Orah stared foolishly at him, before he finally said in his gravelly, slurred accent, “Can I see the doctor?”

Orah stood up quickly, remembering herself. “Please sit,” she said, reaching for his arm. He pulled it away. “Are you in pain now?”

“No,” he said. “I don’t need a doctor, I just want to see Agorik Veerin.”

“You know my father?” she asked, surprised. She had not known that her father had any ties to the Eastern clans.

He shook his head once, curtly, and said, “By name. Is he here or not?”

“I am the Doctor Veerin,” her father said, emerging from behind the curtain into the waiting room. He did not look at Orah, but he gestured subtly with his hand and she moved closer to his side, under his protective arm. “Have you been sent?”

“No,” the man said. “You don’t know me, but maybe you knew my brother. Vodes Dex?”

“Blessed ancestors,” Orah’s father breathed.

For the first time, some emotion seemed to flicker in the barbarian’s eyes. “You did know him,” he said. “You were his Taskmaster, you’re that Veerin?”

“I am,” her father said, and his voice trembled slightly. He left Orah’s side and gripped the stranger’s arms; he gripped back, and Orah could see that he was even wearing the arm-guards of the Eastern clansmen. She wondered if he was one of their princes, the ones who trained and flew their war falcons. Or...if he had been, once. “Vodes Dex. He was a good man, a good friend.”

The barbarian nodded briefly. “He talked about you. He said the same thing. When I heard you were alive, I knew he’d want me to check on you, see if you needed anything.”

Her father gave him a searching, serious look. “What’s your name, son?”

He ducked his head slightly and said, “Ronon. You wouldn’t remember me. I was five years old when Vodes joined the Legion. Our units joined up in the field once for six months, but it was after you retired.”

“Orah,” her father said, “run home quickly and tell your aunt we have a guest tonight.”

They had more than one guest, in fact. Word spread quickly, as word always seemed to among the Satedan families who lived along three streets in the west of the city; a clansman from the far East was a curiosity, but more than that, every Satedan who lived now meant another clan not yet wiped out, and that mattered to them all. Orah and Aunt Jitta found themselves serving dinner for eighteen – all of the neighbors who were bold enough to invite themselves.

Ronon Dex seemed shy around so many strangers, but he answered questions if they were put to him directly, and he smiled briefly along with the jokes that made everyone else laugh. He had been captured by the Wraith during the last days of the culling but escaped afterward, and now he was serving as a mercenary. None of the rest of his clan had survived, and with no women left to bear more children there was no question of the future: Dex would die when Ronon did. Orah served him the best of everything and tried to be a good hostess, but it was difficult for her to look at him without being overcome with the terror and hopelessness of the situation. Orah’s nightmares were his life, for all the rest of his life.

“He is handsome, isn’t he?” Aunt Jitta said as they were cleaning the kitchen after dinner.

“He must be so lonely,” Orah said. “Can you imagine?”

“Veerin is blessed with better fortune than many clans,” Jitta said. From the front room, Orah’s father called for her, and when she hesitated over the dish sink, Jitta sighed and smoothed Orah’s hair in place with her damp hands. “Go, flower,” she said. “Go see your father.”

There was a fire burning in the grate to cut the chill coming in through the open window; the gathering had gone late into the night. Orah stood by the side of her father’s chair, and he put his arm around her waist, allowing her to lean gently into him. “If you think the choice is difficult for you,” he said – to Ronon, not to her – “imagine how it is for me. She’s my only child. She is the last reason I have to live.” Orah found his hand and covered it reassuringly with hers.

Ronon looked up from the chair where he leaned with his elbows on his knees, his eyes unreadable on Orah’s face. He said nothing, until Orah found herself fidgeting under his gaze.

“You have a wife already,” Orah’s father prodded gently, “or vows that would prohibit it?”

“No,” he said. “Nothing like that. But I don’t know if.... I live on a military base. No one else has a family there. There aren’t laws against it, I don’t think, but– “

“I could speak to your commander. He must see that it is cruel to keep you from – may I be blunt, Ronon? – from the last chance you are likely to have to see your blood kept alive through children raised in a Satedan clan. Orah is rare and precious, not – not only to her father, but to all of us.”

Ronon’s eyes narrowed slightly. “It wouldn’t be my commander’s choice. It would be up to the elder mother, Weir.”

“Then I will speak to her.”

“I don’t– Why? I don’t see why you care so much. There’s other Satedans, here, on Belkan – there’s at least one clan on Belsa, not that I’d recommend it to you. What do you need me for?”

“I know much about your clan from your brother. Dex is – was – strong and honorable, and...conservative.”

Ronon smiled very slightly. “Conservative. Barbarians, you mean.”

“I was never one to look down on your kind, Ronon. You had the courage of your convictions; you did not change for ease or fashion, as most do. I won’t put Veerin’s only hope into the hands of a man whose word I cannot trust completely. I trust Dex.”

“There is no Dex,” he said shortly. “There’s just me.”

“If I could save Dex, I would,” Orah’s father promised softly. “For Vodes’s sake, but also because.... It would be the right thing to do. The loss of the Eastern clans is a great loss to all of us, a piece of Sateda’s heritage that can never be regained. I have no power to give you back your women – I haven’t even had the power to protect my own. But I can promise you this much: any child that is born to Veerin out of your marriage will always know and honor the memory of his father’s people. Marry my daughter, treat her with honor, and bring her home to me with a grandchild, and we are all one step further from the death of all we have known. For you in particular, every step matters.”

Orah waited through a long silence, her fingers digging into her father’s hand. At last, Ronon said, “I think she’s scared of me,” in a strange voice, neither amused nor angry nor sad, but somehow all three at once.

She raised her head quickly; a barbarian might turn away a bride if he thought she was weak or a coward. “I’m not scared,” she said. She remembered Dalina’s hand, cupped safely between her own and trembling on the day of her wedding. Best that it was to be this man, Orah realized, looking clearly into his eyes – one who respected her world, one who came from a clan that valued its word. “I’m not scared,” she said again, and meant it.

“Good,” he said, a little darkly. “It’s no place for children, where I live.”

“Then we’ll go tomorrow,” Orah’s father said. “Your mother Weir– “

“No,” Ronon said. “Better if it’s done before I go back. I don’t want other-worlders involved if they don’t have to be.”

It wasn’t usual, to have a marriage witnessed by only one clan – but then, whether or not he called this woman Weir his elder mother, she was not from Dex. No one was, and why pretend otherwise? Orah’s father extracted his hand from hers and patted her back gently. “Orah,” he said, “go and put on your blue dress.”

There weren’t flowers in the house in the winter, and no time to weave them into her hair anyhow. Aunt Jitta helped her dress and tied the sash of the robe that their father had once bought for Bidia, then brushed her hair out flat. Orah was just as happy that this marriage would be so simply done; she didn’t think she could manage a celebration, when all she could think of was how far from home she would be, this time tomorrow.

She lit candles by the western window and knelt to give thanks to the Ancestors for answering her prayers; she was the instrument of Veerin’s survival, as she had asked them so many years ago to make her. “Our flower,” Aunt Jitta said as she wiped Orah’s face dry afterward. “We’ll miss you, too. The house will hardly seem alive at all, until you and your baby come home.”

The marriage was done more than simply, stripped almost to its bare bones. Her father released her with a soft kiss to the top of her head and let Jitta guide her by the shoulders to stand before Ronon at the hearth and formally offer her. Orah placed her palms together in the sign of surrender and vowed that the child she bore would be Ronon’s. He wrapped his hands around hers and swore to protect her more dearly than his own life, on the honor of Dex and its Ancestors – “and of the city of Atlantis,” he tacked on, somewhat uncertainly. Perhaps he thought the honor of a dead clan wasn’t much of a pledge, for the sum total of Veerin’s future. In the place of a clan elder, Ronon himself held the cup for her to drink, as only clan-kin served one another. For the duration of their marriage, she realized, Dex was fully doubled in size – a truly surreal thought.

She’d thought she would feel...more different. She didn’t feel married; she felt exactly the same. Tired, of course – it had been a very long day and night, by then – but otherwise the same.

“We’ll leave in the morning, as soon as you’re packed,” Ronon told her, not quite looking at her.

“Will...?” Orah stopped when she realized she had no words for this. Hesitantly, she turned her palm in the direction of the small spare room that her father had added years ago to the house. She’d shared it with Dalina and Bidia, the future of Veerin tucked safely away under its low, sloped roof.

He seemed not to understand for a moment, and then he half-turned away and said, “No, we should – I’ll get you home and settled. Then....” He rubbed the side of his hand against his clan mark and frowned hard at the braided rug beneath his feet. “There’s – things I need to settle up with first,” he said gruffly.

She tried to bid him goodnight, but he turned his back to her, and after a moment’s indecision she chose the cowardly route and retreated to the safety of her girlhood bedroom, as if she were still only Orah Veerin.

In the morning, she told herself as she latched the door. She leaned her forehead against the smooth wood and closed her eyes. Tomorrow she would wake and be Orah Veerin adosha Dex, the barbarian’s wife in Atlantis, but tonight she would sleep in her own bed, her own beloved home, and let the future care for itself.

*

Ronon took her by the hand when they walked to the Ring – not with their fingers tangled together as Orah had seen wives and husbands hold hands for comfort and closeness in her father’s office, but with his large hand wrapped tightly around hers as if she were a child he was pulling along behind him on a market trip. She felt a bit like that herself, trotting to keep up with his long strides.

When the Ring swirled to life, he finally looked back at her. “It’ll feel strange at first,” he said, “but it only takes a minute. Don’t be scared.”

“I’m not scared,” Orah said, and it was nice to say that and know it was true, for once. “I’ve been through the Ring before.”

“Yeah,” he said. “I guess you have.”

It was cold on Manaria, but the Atlantis Ring was indoors, in a blue room as big as a building. As soon as she had her feet on the floors, she could see the crust of snow melting off her boots and feel the sweat begin to spring up on the back of her neck, where her heavy greatcoat pressed.

There was too much to look at; it all became a jumble in her mind, just blue and height and shine and moving people. Orah looked back over her shoulder at the empty Ring, overcome with a sudden, foolish urge to run back toward it, to find her father on the other side.

“Well, look what the cat dragged in,” someone said. Orah looked up to see three soldiers coming down the wide staircase side by side – two men and a woman, wearing guns and gray clothing that had a uniform look without being perfectly matched to each other. “All right,” said the same man again, smacking his hands together decisively, “everybody’s fine, rescue mission canceled, see you at dinner.” He tried to turn and head back up the stairs, but the other man caught his sleeve and held on.

“You were coming to rescue me?” Ronon said, bemused. “On _Manaria_?”

“What, they don’t have Wraith on Manaria?” the second man said. His voice was a sleepy drawl, but he had sharp, cautious eyes, and he was looking at Orah while he spoke to Ronon. “Or do they just not have, what’s the word I’m looking for – time?”

“I’m a little late,” Ronon admitted.

“You spent fourteen hours on a six-hour mission, but who’s counting? Hey, at least you made friends.”

The woman came off the staircase slightly ahead of the two men; she was older than Orah, though not as tall, and she had eyes as soft and curious as the dark-haired man’s were hard. “Ronon, she is frightened,” the woman murmured reprovingly.

“I’m not,” Orah made herself say, edging out from behind Ronon. She was an Eastern clanswoman now, and they were known to fear nothing.

“I am Teyla Emmagen, of Athos,” the woman said, bowing her head.

“I’m...Orah Veerin adosha Dex.”

Teyla’s eyes flicked from Orah’s up to Ronon’s. “She is a kinswoman of yours?”

“Yeah, sort of,” he said shortly. “By marriage. I need to talk to Weir.”

“Should I go, too?” Orah asked.

The dark-haired man smiled at her and tugged at the straps of the two small bags Ronon carried over one arm. When he smiled, he did not seem fierce at all, and Orah was less sure why she had feared him at first glance. “Looks like you’re staying a while, so tell you what,” he said. “Let’s find you a room while Ronon talks to– “

“My room,” Ronon said. “Her things go in my room. Orah, this is Colonel Sheppard. He’s the ranking officer in Atlantis, so if he tells you to do something, do it.”

“That’d be new around here,” the Colonel said. “Let the kid have her own room, Ronon. Whatever trouble you’re getting her out of, I doubt you have to watch her every second of every– “

Ronon took Orah by the hand again and started for the stairs. She almost forgot to start walking with him, until he’d pulled her arm taut and she had to stumble to catch up. “She’s not in trouble,” Ronon said. “She’s my wife.”

From behind them, the man who had not seemed interested in her at all until that moment, said, “She’s your _what_?” in a shrill voice. “Excuse me, you have a _what_?”

Orah could hear their steps behind her, but she was busy trying to keep up with Ronon as he took the stairs two at a time. She could hear Teyla’s quiet voice, indistinctly, and the hiss of the man’s voice. “She’s practically a baby!” Orah could hear him say; he sounded genuinely shocked. “She’s – what is she, fifteen, sixteen? You’re telling me this is legal where he– “

“I’m telling you to shut the hell up, Rodney,” the Colonel growled.

There was a wordless beat, and then Rodney said, “She’s pretty, though. Figures she’d be– oh, but – no, I mean, not as – no, wait. Oh, goddammit.”

“Rodney,” the woman said in the same weary, chiding tone that Aunt Jitta used when trying to keep the girls from some mischief she knew they would find a way into anyhow.

“I know, I know, I know,” he said glumly.

At the top of the stairs, Orah looked back. Her bags had been left behind in the middle of the staircase, and Colonel Sheppard was nowhere to be seen.

Ronon didn’t look back.

*

Weir listened to Ronon’s brief explanation of a contract marriage with wide eyes and high-arched eyebrows. They climbed even higher when Orah kissed her on each cheek and said, “May we have your blessing, Elder Mother?”

Ronon’s hand came down on the back of her neck and he pulled her away, not too roughly. “Sorry,” he said. “I told her– She thinks this is like a clan, and you’re– “

Weir held up her hand and looked intently at Orah, searching her face. “Orah,” she said slowly, “I have to ask you this, and it’s important that you answer me honestly. Anything you say is fine, as long as it’s the truth, okay?” Orah nodded. “Are you here against your will?” Weir asked. Her voice was so gentle that it almost hurt. Orah couldn’t speak for a moment. “You’re safe here,” Weir said. “You can tell me. Do you want to be married to Ronon?”

She didn’t want to lie, but every answer felt like half of one. Finally she said, “I want a child, and I want it to be.... My father knows his family, he says they’re...honorable. A child needs a father,” she finished, so lamely that it sounded almost like a question to her own ears.

Weir looked up at Ronon. Whatever she saw in his impassive face made her frown a little, then sigh. “Welcome to Atlantis,” she said. “If you need anything, you can always come to me. And Ronon....”

“What?” he said shortly.

She was silent a moment, then sighed and brushed at a lock of her dark hair. “Nothing,” she said. “I guess...nothing.”

Ronon led Orah through two hallways, and into a kind of elevator, although she couldn’t feel its motion while she was inside it. She had not been in an elevator since she was a small child, following behind her mother on errands in the city; Manaria had no such things. When they disembarked, Ronon put his hands on her arms and steered her to stand in front of him, between him and a set of double doors with a pattern made of what looked like copper and blue glass. “This is Orah,” he said stiffly. “She lives here now. So...let her in whenever she wants.”

“Who are you talking to?” Orah said under her breath.

“The...door,” he said. “It knows things. I don’t know, it knows who I am, so I thought.... I have no idea how it works.” He sounded annoyed with himself, but Orah found it a little comforting to know that all of this was strange to someone besides her.

The room was large, with high windows and two paintings hung on the walls, one in black and white, unfamiliar, and another in shades of red that she felt obscurely that she had seen before. For the most part the room was empty, with a small bed in the far corner. Once she was inside, Orah gratefully took her coat off; her blouse was stuck to her back and under her arms with sweat. Ronon took off his coat as well and flung it harder than necessary over a thin-legged table, making the table wobble. “Are you...?” Orah began.

“Fuck her for thinking I’d _force_ a woman to marry me,” he said, then sighed and stretched a little, locking his fingers together behind his head. For the first time, Orah noticed that he looked tired this morning, as if he hadn’t slept well. “Probably does look like that, though,” he admitted.

“I wasn’t forced,” Orah said. “I....”

“Didn’t want to,” he finished bluntly. “And neither did I. Doubt anyone’ll ask me if I was forced, though.”

Orah surprised herself by smiling at him; she’d expected to be so homesick that she wouldn’t smile for a long time, but it happened before she thought about it. “No. I doubt it. I’ll be eighteen in a few weeks,” she added. At his quizzical look, she said, “Your friend thought I.... I’m not as young as– “

“McKay talks too much,” he said. “And he’s not my friend. I don’t have friends here.”

No family, no friends. She wanted to ask why he was alive at all, but it seemed rude. “Why not?” she ventured.

Ronon shrugged. “It’s just easier if things are...professional. As much as possible. In the infantry, they tell you to know your limits. If you’d risk a mission to save your brother, don’t serve with your brother. If you’d risk a mission to save a friend, don’t serve with friends. Love is like anger – it can make you stronger, or it can get in your way. It...usually gets in my way.”

“Have you ever been married before?”

“Yes. Once. I swore to protect her above my own life, and now she’s dead and I’m alive. So you should probably stop telling people how fucking honorable you think I am.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, not sure if she meant for her words or for his loss. The silence felt heavy and wrong, so Orah said the first foolish thing that came into her head, which was, “Are you a prince?” He looked a little stunned and didn’t answer, so she said, “The things – you wear those things on your arms. I heard they were for...the war falcons...that Eastern princes....”

“A _gehdeney_ isn’t a prince,” he said. “And no, I wasn’t one. If I was, they wouldn’t have let me join the infantry. I probably could’ve been. I was always good with the falcons. But I wanted to travel. See the world.”

“Like your brother,” she said.

“Yeah. Like my brother.”

“So...what is it? A _geh_....”

“ _Gehdeney_. They’re not born, they’re chosen. They train hard and they have a code.... They help keep the Eastern clans alive. They did.”

“Well, but how do they– ?”

“Look, why do you even want to know? There aren’t any more of them, they’re all dead. If I’d become one, I’d be dead, too.”

“And I’d be married to a bricklayer from Zatik,” she snapped, unsure exactly why his words were making her flush with anger. She just – didn’t know what he was trying to prove, bringing up death over and over. Did he think she wasn’t from Sateda, too? That she wasn’t aware that half a million people had died there, nine years ago?

He looked at her in surprise for a moment, then chuckled. “No, you wouldn’t,” he said. “If you were willing to do that, you’d have done it by now.”

“At least he wasn’t a stranger to me.”

Ronon smirked at her and said, “He was a bricklayer. You love Veerin too much; you’d hold out for better seed than that to grow your clan over again.”

“You think I was waiting around, dreaming that some barbarian would come along from nowhere and take me away from my family?” she said in disbelief. Her anger was mounting now, and she heard herself talking loudly, with a high, hysterical note to her voice. “You don’t know me, or anything about me. Some strong, handsome man came along from nowhere and killed my cousin – another one stole my sister. You’re the last thing I ever wanted!”

They stood there for a while after that, with nowhere to go. At last he said, tersely, “There’s worse out there.” And Orah knew that there was, so she couldn’t argue. She set her jaw and said nothing. He waited for her response, then gave up with a little snort. “You weren’t exactly part of my plan, either, you know,” he said, but he sounded more tired than angry. He sounded a little sad. Orah had to curb her instinct to apologize. Finally he shook his head slightly and said, “Come on. I’ll show you where things are in Atlantis.”

*

The city was undeniably beautiful, although Orah wasn’t sure she really believed it had been built by the Ancestors; everything looked so new, so clean and colorful.

Ronon took her all the way up to the top of a tower and outside, so that when she leaned over the rail into the wind, the sea was so far below that all she could see of its surface was moving shades of gray. There was no shore in sight, no birds, nothing but the brittle shell of the sky.

Orah stepped onto the lower rail and braced her hands on the upper one, leaning out further until Ronon said, “Quit that. It’s dangerous.”

She looked back over her shoulder at him, as best she could with the wind lashing her hair over her face. “Are you scared of heights?”

“No,” he said, sounding insulted.

“I don’t know if I believe you,” Orah teased.

He hesitated a moment, then gave her a sharp little smile and stepped up the first rail, then the second, as if it were a staircase. He frowned in concentration for a moment while he found his balance, and Orah realized she was holding her breath, watching the minute adjustments he made to his stance. “I believe you,” she said hurriedly. “Come down now, I believe you.”

“Now who’s scared?” he said, but something in his smile made Orah unable to resent the mockery. She had never seen him smile in happiness, she realized.

A sudden gust of wind flattened Orah’s clothes to her and sent her hair flying, and she reached out in a panic so sudden she didn’t have time to consider it and grabbed his hand and his wrist, over the gauntlet. She didn’t let go until he hopped back down to the deck. “I wasn’t in any danger until you tried to push me,” he said, but mildly, not really as if he’d ever felt in danger.

“I wasn’t trying to push you,” she said. “I was....”

“If I’d been about to fall, you’re too light to have stopped it,” he said. “I’d’ve dragged you over with me, probably.”

“I want to go back inside,” she said. Ronon’s expression melted back into the blank defensiveness that was quickly becoming familiar, and she suppressed a little pang of loss. 

In Atlantis, all food was served in a central room. Ronon gave her a tray and utensils, and she followed behind him as he visited the serving tables, where people offered food she didn’t recognize from deep pans. She looked up at Ronon uncertainly and murmured, “I don’t know what I like.”

“So try some of everything,” he said, and when they sat down, Orah’s tray was so full it almost hurt her arms to carry it.

The table Ronon chose was not far from where Teyla and Rodney and the Colonel – not his friends, Orah remembered, he had no friends – were eating. Rodney raised his hand to wave them over, but Ronon ignored it. Teyla smiled at her, warm and a little sad, and Orah suddenly missed her Aunt Jitta with the force of an earthquake, and Dalina and Bidia, too. “Do you usually eat with your...?” Not friends. Whoever they were, and Orah still didn’t understand who they were to him.

Ronon frowned and didn’t seem to want to respond, so Orah didn’t pursue it. They ate alone, and in silence.

It was dusk when they returned to Ronon’s – to their apartment, and even though morning on Manaria had only been a few hours previous, something about the thick gray light, or the restless sleep she’d had her last night at home, made it easy to feel tired. Ronon sat down in the room’s only chair, under the windows, and he looked even more tired than she felt, really more than tired – lost, somehow. Orah didn’t know what else to do, so she sat down on the foot of the neatly made bed that was hardly larger than her bed at home.

Not home, she reminded herself. This was home now.

“Do you want...” he started, but the hesitant words faltered altogether when she looked over and met his eyes. “Did you like the city?” he asked, and somehow he made it sound like something other than an idle pleasantry. “It’s – pretty nice, isn’t it?”

“It’s beautiful,” she said truthfully.

“You’ll probably get lost; everybody gets lost. I’ll get a radio for you, so you can...ask directions. So you can ask for anything you need, if I’m not around.”

“So I can ask whom?”

He didn’t seem to have considered that before. “Control, I guess. Or Teyla. Teyla would help you out.” That confirmed what Orah suspected, and she nodded. “Anyone would, really,” he said. “They’re all pretty – helpful here. You should try the shower.”

The shower was narrow, closed in by translucent panels that shimmered in soft, prismatic rainbows, and there were symbols laid into the walls that she couldn’t read, but a little trial and error revealed the way that touching them adjusted the temperature and the pressure, or altered the water flow from the ceiling between a hard, steady stream that felt good against the back of her neck and a diffuse spray like being caught in the rain. She did feel more relaxed afterwards, if a little lightheaded from the warmth and the fog.

When she came out, it was full dark in the room, and Ronon was gone. She thought briefly about looking for him, but it was easy enough to guess that she would never find him unless he wanted to be found, and if he wanted to be found, she supposed he’d come back here. So instead she unpacked in the dark, folding her clothes and laying them on the empty top shelf of his closet, clustering her skin cream and face scrub and toothpaste together in the far corner of his bathroom counter. None of it took very long, and then there was nothing much to do except go to bed.

She lingered in the state between sleep and waking for some time, her own heartbeat loud in the total silence, her hair dripping cooling water down her collarbone, underneath her robe. Nothing moved in the room, no sound of running water or low voices outside, or even of wind on the other side of the windows – nothing changed at all until the door suddenly turned bright blue, then opened. Orah closed her eyes against the light.

When she opened them again, Ronon was still by the door, his forearms resting against it and his face against the backs of his hands, breathing in short, harsh bursts. Orah didn’t dare move at all, particularly when he finally pulled far enough away to smash the heel of his hand against the door, then kick it for good measure. He moved stiffly across the room and sat heavily in the chair, without looking in Orah’s direction; she wondered for a moment if he had forgotten she was here at all.

But then he said, “I woke you up. Sorry,” and Orah found it surprisingly...poignant, that he would concern himself with her sleep when he was so clearly in the midst of some intense struggle of his own. He was...a good husband, she thought. A kind man, in spite of his brittleness.

She pushed up on her elbow and reached out with her other hand, putting her fingers on his knee. He went tense at the touch and shifted slightly away from her, but not wholly out from under her hand. “Is it – because of me?”

“Is what because of you?” he said sharply.

“Whatever...whatever upset you.”

He sighed and rubbed his eyebrows with his fingers and thumb. “No,” he said. “Yeah. Yeah, but – no. It’s because of me. Nobody made me do this. It was my decision, and I picked.... Hell with it,” he growled, bending down to work his boots off. “I can’t let things I can’t change.... That’s no way to live. Regretting things.” He bent down to take off his boots, and Orah found herself watching the curve of his back and the sway of his dark hair in the dim light, baffled by the way she could know so little about him and still begin to recognize the lines of him, the way he moved. When her eyes fell on him, her mind supplied _this stranger_ at the same time that it brought forth _my husband_. So strange that both could be true at once, that neither was strong enough to blot out the other.

He stood up and skimmed off his shirt, then unbuckled his belt. He stopped abruptly, seeming to realize that she was watching him, and she felt embarrassed for no single reason and looked aside, at the dark doorway into the bathroom. She heard more than saw him finish undressing, slower and more carefully than before. He came closer then, and she inched away to make room for him in the narrow bed, but he was only crouching on the floor, one hand lying on the blanket in the empty space between them. “Hey,” he said, short but not harsh. “Look.”

Orah didn’t know if he meant that literally or not, but she obeyed anyhow, letting her eyes settle on his face, letting the details of it come clearer in the starlight. She couldn’t read his expression. “You can go home if you want,” he said, a deep whisper in the utter silence. Orah blinked, not sure she knew what he meant. “I won’t.... Not – not won’t. I don’t think I can. If you...if you’re going to cry or something,” he finished, his voice harshening while his eyes stayed lost and something like ashamed.

“I can’t,” she said, remembering Dalina, knocking on the door in the middle of the night. “I wouldn’t...be allowed, if I came as an oathbreaker.”

“You wouldn’t be, if I was the one who rejected you. I could send you away.”

“Then the fault would be on your clan’s honor,” she said, half a question. No one would volunteer such a thing. She must not be understanding him.

“There’s no one left,” he said, sounding hollow and so unbearably sad. “It wouldn’t matter at all.”

But it would. Dex was dead, but dead family was still family, was still real forever, just like leaving your mother’s womb didn’t mean that you were ever anything less than her child, for all your life and forever beyond it. A man’s actions brought glory or shame on all his clan, the dead and the living alike. “Why would you do that?”

Ronon shrugged. “Don’t have much choice,” he said.

But even if all demands of honor were satisfied on every side, there was more to think of. There was the child – the one thing Orah was sure of, the thing that mattered more than her own life. The past was strong, but never so strong as the future. “Come to bed,” she whispered. “It’s all right. Come here.”

She closed her eyes as he climbed into bed and shifted around for a comfortable position, settling on his elbow with one leg overlapping hers. He loosened the tie on her robe and drew it away from her skin with a light touch, only his fingertips, then brought the same hand up to stroke her hair back from her temple with the tips of his fingers, too. His hair felt warm on her skin, brushing over her chest as he lowered his head and kissed the side of her neck softly. He put his hand on her hip and kissed her again in the same place, opening his mouth enough to suck lightly on the spot, and she wasn’t at all sure what to do with her hands, but she put one behind his head and the other high on his arm. His fingers flexed on her hip, a faint movement, but she felt it in the muscles of his arm as well as where his hand moved on her skin.

She had forgotten to breathe; she realized suddenly that she was dizzy with it and sucked in a breath just as he slipped his hand underneath her, against the small of her back, and shifted his weight onto her, pressing her down into the bed. “It’s okay,” he murmured, kissing behind her ear. “Just relax, okay?”

It wasn’t so hard to relax, as long as she concentrated on the way he nuzzled against her neck, the faint, wet brush of his tongue and the scratch of his beard, and not on what she could feel pressed against the inside of her thigh. She wished it would all happen faster, though; the longer she had to think about it, the more she began to fear that he was stalling because he knew something she didn’t.

He seemed absorbed in what he was doing, though – kissing down her shoulder, then back to the underside of her jaw and up the vein in her neck. He put a hand behind her head and lifted it up slightly, shifting up so that he could bite softly at the back of her neck. It tickled a bit; she squirmed, and suddenly her drifting, disconnected thoughts came together in a bright burst of clarity. She dug her fingers involuntarily into his shoulders, stunningly, terrifyingly aware of his body – the play of each muscle and the weight of each bone, the expanse of his smooth skin, the way her own arms and legs rearranged themselves instinctively to accommodate his size. She no longer had any space of her own – so much as a breath that she was not sharing with him; the blood roared in her head, and she tried to say something that only emerged as a panicky little whine.

“Shh,” he said, whispering the sound against her lips, but he drew back then, letting her suck in a deep breath and bring her hands up to rub her eyes. He took her wrists and moved her hands away from her face, and she wasn’t sure how well he could see her in the darkness, but he seemed to be studying her face intently. “It’s okay,” he said again, settling back on his knees and keeping his hold on her wrist with one hand while the other hand let her go and came to rest on her belly, moving there in soft circles.

“Just...hurry,” she said, her voice hoarse. The worst part was not having a clear picture in her head of how – of what came next. She knew, of course. More or less she knew; Aunt Jitta had explained it to her years ago, and she’d thought she understood it perfectly well, but the words in her memory bore almost no resemblance to the real feeling of being alone with a man, naked and small and confused. She didn’t know anything. She certainly didn’t know what came next, and wondering helplessly was by far the worst part. If he would just hurry up....

“Yeah, okay,” he said absently, and shifted his hand so that he could slide one finger inside her and then back out.

It felt – nothing like any other sensation Orah could name. Heat flared up under her skin, as if he had pressed down on a faint burn mark, but it wasn’t painful, exactly. He did it again, and there was a sort of discomfort to the rough, hot drag of his skin against hers, but at the same time she felt her heartbeat pick up noisily, and her hands skidded clumsily against the sheet beneath her. She wanted to – touch something, or do something. She wanted – something, and she wasn’t sure– 

He did the same thing a third time, then let the ends of two fingers sink further inside her and stay there. Orah heard herself growl from somewhere inside her chest; it felt more like a burn than ever, but she was still parting her legs further. She didn’t know if she liked it or not, exactly, but she had some irrational certainty that she wanted more, that she was liking it more than before and might like it more still, if he didn’t stop.

He surprised her by putting his fingers briefly in his mouth, but then when he pulled them out and touched her again, she understood why. Each touch was smoother, easier, and Orah gasped, her knees coming up to press against his biceps, her head arching back on the pillow. That odd afterburn of soreness was gone, replaced by something completely unfamiliar, and even more frightening in its own way. She could hear herself breathing in the silence, sharp and quick, and she was wetter now than his small amount of saliva could account for. “Hurry,” she said again in a tight voice that somehow didn’t sound like her at all, and he pushed both fingers all the way inside her and turned them, drawing himself up along her body at the same time. Orah clutched at his shoulders clumsily and made a helpless little sound against his closed lips as he kissed her. His other hand covered her breast, one finger rubbing very faintly over the tip of a raised, tender nipple.

She made another noise as he entered her, relief and protest at the same time. It hurt more than she expected – not only the size of him, but the way his weight pressed against her pelvic bone and rubbed there every time he moved – but it didn’t only hurt. She tried to shift under him, but nothing quite fixed the problem, and then he moved his hand up her side, his fingers against her back, and she shuddered and closed her eyes and gave up trying to understand any of it. Sensation swirled through her, hot and dizzying, as if her insides were being stirred up like stew with a heated ladle. She put a hand on the back of his head, listening to his short flares of harsh breath against her ear, wondering what would happen when she was accustomed to this, when the strangeness of it wasn’t so overwhelming – if she would like it or not. She couldn’t decide.

He swore softly in her ear at the end, his muscles going tight for a moment before he relaxed against her, and then after another moment for his breath to start coming softer and slower, he moved away as far as the small bed would allow. “You okay?” he said.

Orah nodded. She was still wearing her robe, more or less, and she gathered it closed around herself as she climbed over him and went to the bathroom, closing the door quietly.

She ran water from the sink into a small blue cup and drank it before she thought to wonder if Ronon would mind her using his cup. Then she was slightly annoyed with herself for her own timidity; this was her home now, she was adosha Dex in every way, and no one would dare forbid her the use of clan property. She had to start thinking like a married woman now, not a little girl. Not every strange place was another refugee camp.

She took another drink of water and patted her damp fingers on the back of her neck and her forehead, watching in the mirror as the flush died down on her skin. The inside of her thighs felt sticky and she considered cleaning herself up, but she told herself that she might somehow interfere with her chances for a child if she did. Truthfully, she just didn’t much want to touch her own skin; it didn’t feel entirely like hers anymore.

Ronon did not have a shrine to his ancestors in the apartment, so she knelt for just a moment on the warm, smooth floor of the bathroom and offered a quick prayer for a healthy daughter for Veerin, then went back to bed.

At first she thought Ronon was asleep; he was lying very still on his back with one arm draped over his waist and the other stretched out to the side, and he didn’t move or react while she gingerly climbed back over him and tried to get comfortable in the small span of mattress available. She managed by lying on her side with her back to him, his arm underneath her neck, so it was a small shock when he finally did move, turning on his side toward her. “Sorry there’s not that much room,” he said, his breath warm against her scalp.

“It’s fine,” she said.

“You really okay?” he said softly. “It’s been.... It’s been a long time since I was married, and it was – different then.”

“Different how?” she couldn’t help asking.

He was silent for a moment, and then he said, “Different because she was in love with me.”

Listening to the raw little scrape in his voice, Orah put her hand gently over his wrist. She didn’t know if he’d allow it or not, but he did.

*

That first night was a little difficult – they didn’t seem to fit easily against each other and Orah slept lightly and fitfully, waking several times to the awareness that he was tense and awake behind her – but it wasn’t until she finally woke in the daylight, alone, that Orah realized what the hardest part of being married was going to be: filling all that time.

There were no meals to cook and no gardens to weed and nothing she needed to go to market for, even if she knew where on Atlantis to find such a thing as a market. She missed her father’s office, with its clean, bare floorboards and copper mirrors hung on every wall to increase the light. She put off getting out of bed for ages, simply because she literally had no idea what to do once her day truly began.

Eventually she had no choice, however. She took a shower and braided her hair and left the room, then went back twice to convince herself that the door really would open for her – did it recognize her, as Ronon thought it did? Either it did or it was never locked at all, no telling which. She went to the only place she was certain she knew how to find: the dining room.

There were six people in the room still lingering over their breakfasts, and the only one Orah recognized was Dr. Weir. Orah glanced at her tray as she passed and then selected the same items for herself to eat – a round bread with butter and jam, a disposable container full of something with the texture of sour cream but pink and sweet, and a cup full of a hot, bitter tea that Orah took one sip of and put aside.

She was almost finished with her breakfast when Dr. Weir glanced up and noticed her at the next table over. Orah nodded politely at her, and Dr. Weir smiled, then seemed to hesitate a few moments over what to do next. Eventually she picked up the tablet in front of her and moved to Orah’s table, sitting across from her. “Good morning,” Orah said.

“Good morning, Orah,” Dr. Weir said. “How was your day yesterday? Your first day in Atlantis,” she added, a little too cheerfully. She was watching Orah keenly, though, thoroughly serious.

“It was fine,” she said. She didn’t entirely want to reveal more than that, but as the fact of her own helplessness became clearer and clearer to her, she wasn’t sure what choice she had. “I don’t really know what to do,” she said. “I mean, I don’t...have anything to do.”

Dr. Weir frowned thoughtfully. “What did you do at home?”

“I like to bake,” Orah said. Her new home didn’t even have an oven in it. Dr. Weir hummed and nodded, then kept looking at Orah as if there should be more. “I went every other day to help my father at his office,” she said. “He’s a doctor. I helped feed his patients and medicate them. I read to them sometimes.” Dr. Weir simply kept looking at her, until she groped for more still. “I’m not a doctor,” she said. “I don’t remember much, but Father used to tell me what he was doing as he did it, and I thought it was all – really interesting.”

“Maybe you’d like to see the Ancient equipment in our infirmary,” Dr. Weir suggested gently. “I’m sure Carson wouldn’t mind giving you a little tour. And ask him to get you one of the backup laptops from the medical stores and help you set it up. There’s no worthier time-suck in the city than our intranet – which may not be saying too much, but it’s what we’ve got.”

The Atlantis infirmary was entirely different from her father’s office, beginning with how there were at least eight doctors working even though there didn’t seem to be any patients. “Carson” turned out to be one of them, a man younger than Orah’s father but with the same kind blue eyes who listened with great care as she stammered through a recounting of her conversation with Dr. Weir. He found a computer for her and showed her how to power it up and set it to a password and how the mousepad worked. That was Orah’s favorite part; even the name was amusing, and she let her finger slide back and forth across the smooth surface, imagining the arrow on the screen as a mouse, skittering and sliding over a bare floor.

“So,” Carson said, “you knew our Ronon back home, did you?”

“No,” she said absently, still fascinated by the screen. “My father knew his brother when they were in the service together. That was when I was very young.”

“Oh,” he said. “I’m sorry, I thought.... Then you only – only just met him?” Orah shrugged, feeling her face grow warm. How backwards these people must think Sateda was, handing off daughters to the care of strange men. She wanted to tell him that her circumstances were unusual, that being the flower of Veerin made her different from other Satedan girls, more valuable but less free. “You’ll come to quite like him, I think,” Carson said, his voice soft, almost conspiratorial. “He’s not the most sociable sort, not one for casual friendships, but those who do get to know him always think the world of him.”

“Yes,” Orah said. “I think I do like him.”

Once she got the computer home she realized that she didn’t know how to do anything but make the mouse run; Carson had showed her how to use e-mail, but of course no one had mailed her anything. She carefully picked out Ronon’s address and composed a note asking when he normally ate dinner, then sent it. That took a while.

He came home late that evening and looked surprised when she asked him about dinner. “Just go whenever you get hungry,” he said. “They’re open most of the time.”

“Well, tonight....” she began hesitantly.

He gave her an odd look and said, “If you’re hungry, go. I already ate.”

So she went back to the cafeteria by herself and ate alone, beans and grains wrapped in flatbread and a strange, sweet red juice and a square of chocolate cake. Everyone else was working over papers or computers while they ate, and she didn’t recognize any of them anyway.

Ronon was already in bed when she got home. She dithered and delayed in getting undressed, not entirely sure why she was stalling; awkward as the sex had been last night, it was still more interesting than anything she’d done today, so in a sense it was the high point of her marriage so far. She should be looking forward to it.

She wasn’t...exactly. Strange, but the part she really didn’t like seemed to be _thinking_ about sex, waiting for it. Once she was in bed and he was leaning over her, shifting her leg with one hand and using the other to touch her hair, sliding it between his fingers, she found herself calming down quite a bit and able to remember that there were things about it she rather liked.

Afterward he leaned down as if to kiss her, then paused, his eyes flicking uncertainly up to hers. Orah wasn’t sure if it was a question or not, or what the question was, or what she wanted to answer, so she didn’t react at all. He let his eyes close for a moment and touched his lips to hers, a strange, almost formal kiss that was over as soon as it started, and then he lay down and pulled her back against his chest, just as they’d gone to sleep the night before.

She listened to her own heartbeat in the darkness, slowing down gradually. She was almost asleep when it struck her that tomorrow she’d wake up and do all of this over again. That was the thing that felt like a smothering weight, like an unbearable, claustrophobic pressure, and that was the thing that made her cry, pressing her face down into the pillow so the sound didn’t wake him.

She must have woken him anyway, though, because as she rapidly ran out of energy for crying, she realized that he was petting her wrist and forearm with light, soothing little strokes. She wasn’t sure if that helped or not, but it didn’t hurt.

*

The next day she was on her own again, of course, and she decided to see the city, this time at her leisure. She certainly had nothing if not leisure. Ronon had found the promised earpiece for her, and she dutifully put it on in case of emergency; she couldn’t imagine using it to call some stranger, or even Ronon, away from their work for anything less than an emergency.

Most of Atlantis stood empty, even the central parts that were not cordoned off, but in Atlantis, even the empty rooms were often something to see. Orah found herself standing in room after room, her head thrown back and turning in circles to look at the sweeping angles of the ceiling, the bright, brittle juts of window, the variegated colors of glass-like paneling. Maybe she could ask for a sketchbook; she had no training in art and no skill for it, as far as she was aware, but the design of Atlantis made her want to try anyhow.

Sometimes the hallways were empty, but just as often they were not. Most of the people she saw in the halls were men, but not all. A sizeable minority wore uniforms and carried guns. Some people ignored her completely, but more of them gave her puzzled looks; she was conspicuous here for her style of dress, and even more conspicuous, Orah realized, for her age. She saw almost no one else who appeared under thirty. The soldiers seemed younger than the civilians, but even they seemed to be at least Ronon’s age, many of them older. It had never occurred to her that Ronon would be among the youngest residents of Atlantis.

Orah stepped through one more of the interchangeable blue and silver doors and immediately reached for something to hold onto; she felt as if she had taken a bad turn and stepped off the edge of the city, into the ocean. The disorientation faded quickly, though, and she realized she was still indoors, just in a large room with a pool of blue water set into mirror-bright blue floors and walls. Two steps brought Orah to the edge of the pool, and she knelt carefully and put her fingers in the water. It was comfortably warm and lit somehow from beneath, so that the ripples in the water reflected upwards, blue light moving over the skin of Orah’s arms. She lay on her stomach, her cheek against the cool tiles, and let her arm sink deeply into the water, getting her dress wet. The sounds and the gentle, dancing lights off the water lulled her, and for the first time in Atlantis, she felt restful.

The door opened again, and Orah started guiltily and sat up, expecting a stranger who might question her right to be here. But it was Teyla, and she asked no questions at all, just gave Orah a slow, courteous nod. She unfastened the string that held her skirt wrapped around her waist and slid into the water.

Teyla swam nearly the whole length of the pool without coming up for air, then twisted with easy grace at the far end and pushed off with one foot to swim back. She put her hands on the edge of the pool beside Orah and looked up at her; Teyla’s hair was bound up, but her bangs and the loose strands were stuck to her face, and she wiped water absently from her eyes as she said, “Do you know how to swim?”

“No,” Orah said – and even if she did, she didn’t think she had the courage to strip down to her underthings like Teyla had. Teyla had come in from the hallway wearing less than Orah had ever worn in public.

“It is not deep, at this end,” Teyla said. “You can stand easily, you see?” When she put her feet on the floor of the pool, the water came up only to Teyla’s chin.

“I don’t know,” Orah said, and once she had said them, the words sounded stupid to her own ears. She didn’t know _what_? Teyla arched one eyebrow at her with a delicate, not-quite-mocking expression that Orah could easily imagine on her sister’s face, any one of the hundred times Orah had been too timid to go along with some scheme of Bidia’s.

Orah took off her dress but kept the shorter slip underneath, not that it afforded much modesty once she was standing in the water. She crouched low so that the warm water closed over her head, watching the way her hair floated around her, then picking it laboriously strand by strand off her face when she stood up again. Teyla floated away on her back.

“I come here often,” Teyla said. Her voice seemed unusually rich and resonant – something about the shape of the room or the tiling, Orah thought. “At first I thought it was a pity to enclose the space, and I could not think why the Ancestors would build such a room where it was not open to the sky, or at least covered by some transparent material. Only much later did I learn that one with the talent for this technology can change the light. With more light, it is like swimming inside blue flame, but I prefer less. The darkness reminds me of the caves I explored as a child – they frightened me, but at the same time, I felt protected there. Before I had ever seen a Wraith, I knew they would arrive from the sky.”

From the sky.... Orah’s homeworld had been destroyed by Wraith, but she herself had never seen one. What she remembered of the Fall of Sateda was the piercing whistle of the darts overhead, and the roar and glare of the bombs, the ground unsteady under her feet and everything collapsing from above. She took her hair in both hands and twisted it, wringing out some of the excess water, which splattered onto the surface.

She heard Teyla’s voice twice before she realized Teyla was saying her name. She looked up and found Teyla much closer to her than she had realized. Teyla seemed about to say something, then stopped, and said instead, “Would you like me to teach you how to swim?”

Perhaps it was not the offer itself, but the simple _would you like?_ that snapped Orah’s shyness in half all at once. It felt like much longer ago than it really had been – the last time someone had asked what Orah would like. She flung her arms around Teyla’s neck and put her head down. Teyla curved one hand securely behind Orah’s head and remained as steady under Orah’s weight as she had been fluid and graceful while swimming.

Eventually she stood up straight again and said, “I’m sorry.”

“I do not want you to be sorry,” Teyla said. “I take this as a gesture of friendship, not an insult.”

“We don’t really know each other,” Orah said. “It’s just...you remind me of my aunt. And of my sister, a little.”

“Do you come from a large family?”

“No,” Orah said. “Well – no. Veerin was never a very large clan, but it seemed big to me, when I was young. Most of my kin died in the Fall, though. After that it was just my father and my aunt and my great-uncle, and my cousin Dalina and my sister and me.” In case it wasn’t clear, she added, “That’s very small, for Satedans.”

“I understand,” Teyla said. “I never had strong ties to Sateda, but I know that a clan there can be easily the size of a small tribe or a village on other worlds.”

“What about you?” Orah asked.

“My people have always been small in number,” Teyla said. “We do not place overmuch importance on blood ties; all of us have the claims of family on all the rest. It is much the same in Atlantis, I have learned.”

“So this city is like a clan.”

“More like than the Lanteans themselves are aware,” Teyla said with a little smile. “But there is a degree of formality here that is very unlike the way my people are when we are not among strangers. Lanteans are a warm people, but they are also quite conscious of rank and order. Everyone here makes an accounting of their actions to someone positioned above them, and likewise they know who is in a position to advocate for their needs should a conflict arise. Those of us who come in from outside sometimes must be bolder in advocating for ourselves. They forget that it is no one’s duty to watch over us but our own.”

Orah thought that over. “It doesn’t sound warm,” she said. “It sounds lonely.”

Instead of arguing with her, Teyla looked as if she were thinking that over carefully. “I think,” she finally said slowly, “that the fear of loneliness is never very far from a Lantean. It is to them what the fear of Wraith is on worlds like ours – the shadow that makes the light more precious. The distance they hold between themselves and those beneath and above them in the chain – the way in which they pass through one another’s lives – these things breed a certain independence, and a certain solitude. But when they do choose to bind themselves to someone, they do it with more passion than I think I have ever seen. Never underestimate a Lantean friendship, or imagine you know the limits of it.”

“Is that why Ronon said he doesn’t have friends here? Because he doesn’t have friends...like that?”

Teyla looked a little surprised by that. She smiled, but grimly. “Did he say that? I am sorry to hear it.”

“He said...that love usually gets in his way.”

“Ah,” Teyla said. “Now that may well be true, especially of late. But no, I am Ronon’s friend, and I believe that Rodney is as well, though both of them would doubtless deny it. And John is....” Teyla lapsed into a troubled silence for a moment, then shook it off with a little sigh. “My people would say that Ronon is John’s _keyon suem_. That is the arrow that Athosian hunters keep in reserve; only fired in times of greatest need and hunger, but it never fails to bring down its target.”

Orah couldn’t make any sense of that. Maybe because she’d never hunted before? “Ronon is...an arrow?”

Teyla smiled, but not mockingly at all. “Metaphorically, yes. A capable hunter trusts his _keyon suem_ completely, but he keeps it close by more than he fires it. His need never becomes so great; simply knowing that he can draw his _keyon suem_ any time he chooses makes him stronger, and so my people say that anything or anyone who inspires such faith that you are lifted toward your better self serves as a _keyon suem_ for you. So it is for John; he is more of a man, and more of a leader, than I think he was before he had Ronon in his quiver.”

Nowhere in her memory of the past two days could Orah find the face of anyone who had seemed to be so closely tied to Ronon. Could he have been off-world all this time, maybe? “John?” she inquired.

“Colonel Sheppard,” Teyla said. “John Sheppard.”

Orah remembered him; she hadn’t seen him since she came through the Ring. He had been kind to her – she thought. Although when she recalled his face, his eyes seemed angry. So much had happened in the past few days that her arrival felt long ago, indistinct in her memory.

Teyla helped her out of the water when their swim was over, and Orah tried to wring out her hair and the skirt of her slip before she put her dress back on over it, but she still ended up with everything wet. She tried to put her shoes back on, but the straps hurt her feet where they slid against wet skin, so she carried them instead.

Swimming – even as Orah did it, which meant mainly splashing about in the shallowest water – proved tiring, and she found herself hungry, so she went to the cafeteria and had juice and two sugar-crusted pastries. As she watched, she noticed there was a door behind the food, where uniformed men passed back and forth carrying trays or buckets of dishes – a door to the kitchens. Orah finished her snack and then sat for a time, her clothes drying stiffly, the conditioned air making her skin crawl. People came and went at a gradual pace, but only the same few seemed to have access to the kitchens, or even to notice it. It seemed clear that on Atlantis, cooking was a specialist’s occupation, like engineering or curing the sick.

But Orah liked to cook, and although she liked the fried pastries she’d been eating, her own were better. She’d made her first tartroot pudding when she was ten, and it had already been better than anything her older sister could bake; by the time Orah was fifteen, she could make a better pudding than Aunt Jitta could. Orah liked to make all kinds of things, but sweets were her favorite: there was a fine precision to baking, a need for keen attention and a moderate hand, never too much of a good thing, but at the same time a baker’s stinginess would come out in the flavor. Orah was _good_ at it, and for a moment she was hot with anger under her cold skin. Who _were_ these people, to think they could take it away from her?

_Those of us who come in from the outside_ , she heard Teyla’s calming voice say, _sometimes must be bolder in advocating for ourselves_ , and Orah realized with a start that no one had taken anything at all from her. She hadn’t had it to begin with, and she hadn’t asked for it, either.

Orah slipped her shoes back on and took her empty plate and cup to the door. It slid open abruptly while she was still working up her courage and she had to jump out of the way of a man carrying a hot pan. He didn’t seem to notice her, but she slipped inside through the door before it closed.

The first man who did notice her frowned and grabbed her dishes out of her hands. “Hey, what are you doing here?” he said. “That’s not where these go.”

“I’m Orah Veerin...” she began, but the words came out hoarse and small, and he didn’t hear her.

“No civilians behind the line,” he said. “It’s a safety risk.”

“I’ll be careful,” she said, but he put his hand on her shoulder to turn her face toward the door, and she instinctively put her arm up and pushed his hand away as hard as she could.

“Sorry,” he said, raising his hands a little, and he seemed to mean it. “Are you looking for somebody or what?”

Orah looked past him and got her first real look at the kitchens. Everything was arranged in long tables and the long walkways between them – even the ovens were in a long row, and the flat, table-like surfaces of what seemed to be stoves but looked more like giant griddles. Along the span of the tables, people were at work cutting vegetables, operating large machines that mixed dough on a metal arm, turning meat on top of the griddle-surfaces to brown it. All of them were men, as far as Orah could tell – although dressed as they all were, with their hair covered up by caps, she wasn’t completely positive.

“Yes,” she said. “I need to talk to somebody.”

It wasn’t easily done; she had to talk to three different people, all of whom seemed to find her request increasingly baffling. They kept explaining that she could eat in the cafeteria any time she wanted, and then that if she had special dietary requests she could file a menu plan, until Orah was too irritated to be scared anymore. “I know I’ll be in your way, I’m _sorry_ ,” she said to Sergeant Wayne, in whose cramped office they had finally settled her. “If I had my own kitchen I wouldn’t have to bother you, but I _don’t_.”

Sergeant Wayne folded his big arms and looked at her for a long moment, more curiously than any of the others had. “Where are you from, now?” he asked.

_Manaria_ , she started to say. 

“Sateda.”

It didn’t seem to mean anything to him; she doubted Manaria would have, either. She had the sense that it was a rare honor to do as Ronon did, to leave the city and travel freely by Ring. He was obviously highly-placed here, or the Lanteans’ elder mother wouldn’t take such an interest in his affairs as she had. “And what do you do here?”

The honest answer was _nothing_ , but that seemed to give away what little leverage Orah had in this situation. But it was embarrassing to realize just how empty-handed she was in the face of such a simple question; all she had was the child, the future of Veerin, and she was under no illusions as to how irrelevant that would seem to a Lantean who’d never even heard of Sateda. “I live here,” she said testily. Her face felt hot.

“Fair enough,” the Sergeant said.

Orah didn’t really know why he gave in, except that he might have sensed that she had nothing better to do than wait there, planted in his office, until she had her way. “Certain hours we’re busier than others,” he told her, “so we can’t have you in here while we’re getting ready for the dinner rush. But I’ll e-mail you some times that would be all right, probably mid-afternoon.”

“Thank you,” she said, and then, “Wait, I can – use everything here, can’t I? The food and the ovens and – everything?”

Sergeant Wayne shrugged and said, “It’s your food. You live here.”

“Can I start today?”

Orah’s first attempt to cook in the Lantean kitchens almost didn’t come together at all: some of their staples were familiar to her, others just the slightest bit off, and some were a complete mystery. In fact, those were the most interesting of all, and she spent more time going through bottles and jars and canisters, sniffing and tasting things off the tips of her fingers, than she did cooking. A few of the other cooks looked askance at her and a few ignored her, but one or two seemed first amused, then interested in what she was doing, particularly when she started to caramelize a batch of Ginyulit red onions, which apparently the Lanteans hadn’t even known was how everybody ate them. They’d been tossing them in soups instead. Orah allowed them to sample slices hot from her pan, and perhaps won an ally or two.

As much work as she had to simply learn her surroundings, Orah kept the dinner itself simple, more or less the same thing that the Lantean cooks were fixing for the communal dinner: thin-sliced meat simmered in a broth with vegetables and a generous amount of a sweet red sauce called ketchup (“What does it go on?” Orah asked, and the other cooks laughed and said, “Everything,” which was never true, of course, but she didn’t doubt its versatility at all), then poured over toasted bread. She also discovered that what she’d seen on the cafeteria line and had thought were vegetables and dipping sauce was actually meant to be eaten out of a bowl, with the vegetables as a base and the sauce poured over the top like frosting. Thankfully, rice was rice on nearly any world, even though Lantean rice was so bland that it had to be cooked in meat-broth to get any decent flavor at all. By the time Orah got her pie into the oven (pie crust was so easy to make that Orah could’ve done it hanging upside-down like the spatulas and spoons over the kitchen tables, although she had to take it on faith that the mix of unfamiliar berries she’d thrown inside would bind together in the end), she felt strangely euphoric. She didn’t even mind being turned out of the kitchens with instructions on when to come back to collect her dinner.

She went back to her apartment and sat down to write Ronon an e-mail telling him to come home instead of to the cafeteria for dinner. By the time she closed her computer, exhaustion was catching up with her, and she was still wearing her formerly wet clothes, now dried to a crisp texture by the heat of the kitchen. She took a long shower and put on a new dress, then after some thought, tied one of the patterned wraps around her hips. Aunt Jitta had sent two of them and a dress, an arm-ring and an anklet – all that survived of the treasures that once were worn by the women of Veerin on the most formal of occasions. The clothing was nearly a hundred years old and the jewelry much older than that, and Orah felt more than a little guilty wearing it in her own home for no reason at all – except that it was so beautiful, deep purple embroidered with dusty gold, and she felt as if she’d waited all her life to grow up and be allowed to wear it.

It was early evening by then, and with nothing else to do, she went back to the kitchens to check on her food. The red-haired cook who’d suggested that they should try frying Ginyulit onions in rings was still there, and he whistled when she came in. She wasn’t sure why, but he must not have meant to, because he apologized right away, then said, “Hey, what’s your name anyway?” as he began to stack a wheeled cart with her covered dishes.

“Orah Veerin,” she said.

“Are you a doctor or what? My name’s Kyle.”

She felt somehow as if she wasn’t following the meaning of his words, but he was smiling cheerfully at her, so she smiled back and said, “No, I’m not a doctor.”

“I didn’t think so,” he said. “You seem pretty young, but you never know around here.” Kyle himself didn’t seem much older, and just noticing that made her suddenly even happier to talk to him. “You’re all dressed up now.” Orah tugged at the edge of the wrap, still feeling just a bit guilty about wearing it at all, and shrugged. “You want the plastic, or you want the real plates and stuff? We keep some for IOA visits, mostly, but you look like you might have something special planned.”

“No – I mean, yes,” she said. He winked at her. “Thank you,” she said as he took plates and flatware and glasses out of a cabinet and added them to her cart.

“Two sets?” Orah nodded. Kyle added four bottled drinks and then a taller, empty bottle with a candle in the neck, melted wax hardened on the sides. “We had this left over from something else,” he said, and she murmured her thanks again and took the rail of the cart from Kyle. “Hope this isn’t out of line,” he said, “but your friend’s really lucky. There’s a shortage of pretty girls coming around here to make a nice dinner for someone, so...you be sure he appreciates it.”

He was smiling at her again, and Orah looked down at the cart, flattered and nervous in equal measure. “He’s not really my friend,” she said. “He’s my husband.”

“Oh,” Kyle said, clearly startled. “Well.... Have a good night.” 

The only table in Orah’s apartment was oddly shaped, a narrow wedge with one metallic post leading to a four-footed base; it suited Atlantis, with all its smooth edges and blunt angles, but it wasn’t easy to set for dinner. She put out the place settings and left the food on the cart nearby. Everything was in dishes with sealed lids and warm to the touch, and according to Kyle the Ancient insulation would keep the food warm for a good long while. It was still early for dinner, in Orah’s opinion, but she wasn’t sure when Ronon normally ate, so she thought it was better to be ready early than late. She set up the candle on the table, but had nothing to light it with.

By sunset when he wasn’t home, she checked her e-mail and found no messages. An hour later she tried the radio, but all she did was accidentally contact the main control room and ask in an embarrassed stammer if they could connect her to Ronon Dex. There was a long silence over the headset, and a kind voice said, “I think he’s out without his radio, ma’am – he does that a lot. If it’s an emergency, I could ping Colonel Sheppard for you. He’s more likely to know than anyone.”

“It’s not an emergency,” she said. “I’m sorry to bother you.”

The Ancient dishes were still warm when Ronon came back to the room, but it was after ten o’clock. He stopped as the door closed behind him and looked oddly at the table. “You didn’t get my message?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “What’s this?”

“Just...dinner.”

“I’ve had dinner,” he said, leaning over to pull his boots off. “You didn’t let it get cold, did you?”

“No,” she said, “I think it’s– “ He gave her a little grunt that sounded approving, then closed himself into the bathroom. A moment later, she heard the shower.

Orah found herself moving slowly, a strange lag between choosing to move and being able to do so. It took long enough to fill her plate and her glass, at that pace, that she had only just done so when he came out of the shower, barefoot and bare-chested with his hair twisted as far up off his shoulders as possible and knotted there. He laid down on top of the bed, over the blankets, and picked up a book.

... _sometimes must be bolder_.... Orah had to swallow, then clear her throat before she trusted her voice to sound as ordinary as she wanted it to. “I spoke with Sergeant Wayne today,” she said.

“Sergeant who?”

“Sergeant Wayne, who runs the kitchen. He said if I was careful to come at times I wouldn’t be in anyone’s way, I could make dinner there.”

“Sounds like a lot of work,” Ronon said.

“I don’t mind it,” she said. “And I have a lot of free time.”

“Guess you do.”

Orah put her fork down and straightened her back, so that if he looked in her direction she would seem braver than she felt, even though she was twisting her fingers nervously in the folds of her skirt. “I think we should eat dinner together.”

“I’m not hungry.”

“Not tonight,” she said. “I mean from now on.”

That made him look away from his book and at her, finally. “Every night?”

“ _Yes_ ,” Orah said, much louder than she’d meant to, “ _every night_.” He looked surprised by that. Orah was a little, as well. She tried to stay calmer when she said, “What did you think it was going to be like? You could marry me and I’d just...never be here, never bother you? I’m sorry if I bother you, but – no one made you do this, remember? You’re my husband now, you don’t have a choice about that, but you still have to choose...what kind of husband you’re going to be.”

He was silent a moment, but he didn’t look like he was getting angry. “I don’t know what to say to you,” he finally said.

And she couldn’t entirely fault him for that, since she didn’t have very much to say to him, either. Why should someone like him, a soldier from a world that was technically Orah’s own but in reality far removed from anything she’d ever known, care about tartroot pudding or her garden back home or her chambalaus game? All they had in common was Sateda, and Orah didn’t truly want to hear his stories about that any more than she wanted to tell hers. “You don’t have to talk to me,” she finally said. “Just...don’t pretend I don’t exist.”

“Okay,” he said.

She ate her dinner and then resealed the leftovers, unsure whether they’d keep til the morning or not. Only one way to learn. She wasn’t very hungry, in spite of the late hour, but she hated to waste a mostly-fresh pie, so she cut a small slice out of it for the sake of principle. She didn’t notice Ronon leave the bed until he was suddenly right next to her, sitting down slowly in the chair beside her, almost as if he expected her to tell him to stop. “Do you want a piece?” she said.

He shrugged a little and said, “Smells good. But – you’re mad at me, so – I don’t know. Is it okay?”

“Of course it’s okay,” she said. “I’m not – I’m not mad.” He gave her a look, and she said, “I’m not.”

The filling was a little runny, and Ronon poked it back inside the crust with the back of his spoon. “It’s the same color as your wrap,” he commented. “It’s...a pretty color. Is that yours or Veerin’s?”

“It’s mine,” Orah found herself lying. “It’s – my father bought it used at a trade fair, he saw the pattern and he figured it was scavenged from Sateda, he thought a Satedan should have it, so he bought it.” _Shut up_ , she ordered herself. He’d know she was making it up from the nervous babbling, for sure.

“If you have a daughter,” he said in a soft, almost wistful voice, “is there even anything left for Veerin to give her?”

“A few things,” Orah said when she found her voice again. “Not...not very much.”

He nodded down at his pie. “Well,” he said, “a few things is more than nothing.”

As Orah was resealing the pie plate, he somehow snuck up on her again – he moved lightly and quietly, for such a big man – and when she turned around, she was almost nose-to-neck with him. He touched her hips briefly to stall her from taking a step back, then untied her wrap. “This looks pretty old,” he said. “You should be more careful with it, if you don’t want it to get worn out.”

“I don’t wear it that much,” she said.

Ronon folded the wrap over the back of her chair, then without warning scooped her up and carried her to bed.


End file.
